Book Review

If the movie business baffles you, it helps to understand that between them Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck define Hollywood's divided soul. On the industry's calendar, Thanksgiving to New Year's Day is Daffy's time: his perennially thwarted schemes are always about getting bystanders to agree with his preposterously idealized self-image, and that's when each year's lumberingly noble Academy Award contenders crowd marquees, striving to turn artistic prestige into both an end in itself and a means of attracting audiences. But summer—or, rather, "summer" (in terms of actual release dates, the multiplex version now starts before Memorial Day and is all over but the shouting by mid-July)—is Bugs's season in the sun, wherein profit is brassily conceived as not only an end in itself but also a means of gaining industry prestige, otherwise known as beating the competition. Needless to say, Bugs idealizes nothing except success.

Today's 800-pound Daffy—the heir to Samuel Goldwyn's mighty quacking—is Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, since he clearly won't rest until his company's Oscars are numerous enough to do battle with the emperor Qin Shihuang's terra-cotta army. But the Bugs side of movies is the subject of Dade Hayes and Jonathan Bing's first-rate Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession. It is published, let us note, by Miramax Books, which may or may not irritate the rival studios being scrutinized, but does remind us that Harvey is sentimental enough to think that having an eponymous print division confers classiness. In contrast, Rupert Murdoch probably has to pinch himself on most days even to remember he owns HarperCollins.

Hayes and Bing's opus doesn't live up to its pop-sociological subtitle. The audience's internalization of industry yardsticks of success, a phenomenon to delight behavioral scientists, is only fleetingly discussed. But that's no real cause for regret, because what these two have actually produced is a classic look at Hollywood in the age of box-office megabucks—a book to set alongside Lillian Ross's Picture, John Gregory Dunne's The Studio, and Steven Bach's Final Cut, the best of a genre that ought to be more crowded. In a culture as media-driven as this one, finding out what goes into the entertainment we consume can be every bit as educational as it was to learn from Upton Sinclair how the meatpacking industry did its thing.

The only alarm bells the authors want to set off, however, are in the biz itself, which will almost certainly mistake the sound for wind chimes. Briskly, knowledgeably, and often wittily, Open Wide puts the inanities of Hollywood's conventional wisdom on display by tracking the fortunes—from inception to the shouting—of the following three summer-2003 releases, which had nothing in common except premieres timed for the high-profile July 4 weekend and the hopes their respective studios had riding on them. Terminator 3 was Arnold Schwarzenegger's belated return, on the way to Sacramento, to his signature role as a cyborg; Legally Blonde 2 was Reese Witherspoon's reprise of her star-making turn as Elle Woods; and eventual last-place finisher Sinbad was DreamWorks SKG honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg's attempt to out-Disney Disney, his former employer, at the traditional animated features that DreamWorks's own all-computerized Shrek had just helped define as old hat. As each of these behemoths staggers toward the starting gate, the triple narrative develops into a fascinating examination of the pseudo-methodical lunacy—geared to second-guess every aspect of a project except whether it was worthwhile in the first place—shaping each creative (i.e., marketing) decision along the way. At the same time, we're given an eye-opening tour of all the practicalities involved in manufacturing and selling summer blockbusters, from the etiquette of press junkets and the 24/7 hum of the Technicolor warehouse where the posters and trailers are processed to the inner workings, midway between Metropolis and Rube Goldberg, of today's twenty-two- and thirty-screen megaplexes.

Another quality shared by Hayes and Bing's chosen movies is that they turned out to be inconsequential—failing even to register as pop events, which is how summer blockbusters achieve cultural salience. Not even T3, the biggest brand name here (and the winner, for what little it's worth besides dollar signs, of that year's July 4 box-office contest), has stayed in moviegoers' memories, except as a suitably bizarre prelude to its star's entry into politics. Yet that doesn't make the book any less interesting. After all, the great irony of rabbit season versus duck season is that the supposedly more thoughtful movies, the ones that put Hollywood's best face forward, with their unctuous production values and hazy sensitivity, are by and large not only equally forgettable but also more meaningless: they don't tell us as much about who we are.

Face it, when tomorrow's cultural historians get down to pegging that elusive nineties zeitgeist, they aren't likely to waste time pondering The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, or American Beauty, three vacuously "classy" Best Picture winners that touched on absolutely nothing of any moment to the public. But they'll be agog at the cornucopia of revealing intimations in the decade's definitive summer movie, 1996's stupid/profound sci-fi epic Independence Day. With its fighter-pilot president leading ragtag patriots to victory, its startling equation of America's fortunes with those of the planet at large, and its berserk fantasies of revenge on literally dehumanized enemies, ID4—to use the movie's post-literate shorthand title, itself a brilliant piece of advance branding—foreshadowed the absolutism of the George W. Bush era as surely as the success of Star Wars in 1977 augured Reagan's rise. Curiously, Terminator 3, which drew on the same stock of ragged-glory imagery after 9/11, didn't get nearly as much oomph out of it.

Yet when a commercial movie ends up being expressive, it's usually by accident. And since Hollywood is disquieted by flukes—which even when they're hugely profitable are terrifying reminders that nobody knows anything—the industry's traditional reaction to them is to try to formalize their ingredients into sure things. The original Legally Blonde, for instance, was a tossed-together, feckless movie that connected thanks to Reese Witherspoon's ransacking of her formidable bag of tricks to communicate vivacity—the kind of acting that never wins awards, even though few things are harder than making a piece of floss work with no help from the script. But by the sequel expectations were through the roof, the actress's asking price had gone up to $15 million (only $5 million less than the first film's entire budget), and panic was in the air. As a result, LB2's failure—despite a perfectly respectable box-office take—to outperform its predecessor was a disappointment that Hollywoodites promptly converted into a debacle. "A sniper bullet through the heart of a franchise," one marketing exec called the sequel, which is a dizzying example of insider delirium; it's the addition of that little word "sniper" that transforms the rhetoric from merely excessive to unhinged.

If Picture had a weakness, it was Lillian Ross's complacent assumption that John Huston's lackluster adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage—an essentially unfilmable novel, since its surface actions don't add up to much without Crane's insights into the hero's mental state—would have been a masterpiece if not for the studio's interference. That familiar conflict, the defining cliché of most moviemaking sagas, doesn't really come up here; the kind of people who get hired to assemble contraptions like Terminator 3 and Legally Blonde 2 don't have creative priorities at odds with the business. At most they're haggling with "the suits"—a term that flatters its users by preserving an all but irrelevant schism—over whether this year's Edsel should have fins.

The only filmmakers in Hollywood who can pretend they're above all this are the ones who've already made their wad. After helming the first Terminator and its lucrative 1991 sequel, T2: Judgment Day, James Cameron scorned the threepeat: "With the third Terminator, there were dollar signs on everything," he airily said. "The original sense of guerrilla filmmaking was gone." Come again? Famous as the most expensive movie filmed up to then (it cost more than $100 million), the turgid T2 was already a travesty of The Terminator's terse, B-movie pulp poetry. The third picture was only a redundancy, and relatively modest as grotesquerie goes. But in the meantime, Cameron had directed that ultimate sequel-unfriendly project (unless The Passion of the Christ counts, and I do worry that Mel Gibson believes otherwise) Titanic, which qualified as guerrilla filmmaking at about the level Stalin qualifies as a guerrilla—and which earned Cameron so much money that he could have launched his own steamship line.

From Atlantic Unbound:

Flashbacks: "Gone With the Wind" (July 1998)
In 1973, Gavin Lambert told of the fortuitous circumstances that brought this would-be American epic to life, and a group of critics—including Stanley Kauffmann, Judith Crist, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—attempted to explain its perennial popularity.

Complicating things is the demand to hew to the tried-and-true that comes from franchise fans themselves, usually expressed as a devout wish that the latest reprise won't "ruin" their beloved touchstone. (Never mind that complaining about what George Lucas has done to Star Wars is now many Star Wars nutters' favorite hobby—which only demonstrates that some religions can outlast even Yahweh's fallibility.) This kind of pressure is nothing new: David O. Selznick bowed to Gone With the Wind readers' howls that only Clark Gable could play Rhett Butler, and stars from Mary Pickford to Humphrey Bogart—and let's not forget Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler—faced resistance when they essayed mold-breaking roles. The new wrinkle, as Open Wide reveals, is that today's hardcore franchise fans are not only self-conscious interest groups but, thanks to the Internet and the media-age paradox of institutionalized mass subcultures, impressively organized ones. According to Clerks director Kevin Smith, himself a mass-subculture poster boy, their stake in a property like Terminator 3 amounts to "a sense of authorship"; their emotional investment not only trumps but is vital to the continuing health of the filmmakers' economic one.

As Smith says, the transformation of audiences into quasi-formalized constituencies never happens with movies like The Human Stain, which, for all their genteel but real merits, function as the educated version of escapism—elegant diversions that nobody is likely to get obsessed with. This just proves that, like it or not, the crud is where the vitality is. Almost a year before T3's release its director, Jonathan Mostow, took care to make a pilgrimage to the giant comics trade show Comic-Con, where he solemnly swore to a crowd of dubious true believers that he was "making the movie that, as a fan of the franchise, I'd like to see as the third installment." The crowd went nuts only for the ultimate validation—Schwarzenegger in the flesh. The resemblance to Karl Rove's shoring up "the base" before peddling George W. Bush to mainstream voters is uncanny.

Indeed, one of Open Wide's most fascinating if inexplicit themes is the degree to which pop culture now functions as politics by other means. In however innocuous a form, politics itself mostly alienates audiences; in most bizzers' opinion, the fatal mistake made by LB2 was to pack the heroine off to Capitol Hill, a setting few Legally Blonde fans could identify with. In Hayes and Bing's account the first big "Uh-oh" for the sequel comes when one girl in a preteen focus group calls two-time Oscar winner Sally Field, playing a congresswoman, "the lady in the black"—as in "the lady in the black is really boring." Another girl asks an absolutely superb question about Elle Woods—"Why'd she go to Washington?"—and the fact that the filmmakers had apparently never asked themselves this doesn't say much for their savvy. But even as LB2's makers are bumping up against the teen crowd's stony aversion to anything related to government, Schwarzenegger's budding gubernatorial candidacy—and isn't "gubernatorial" a word seemingly coined in the expectation that one day we'd get to hear Arnold say it?—is glamorizing politics as pure pop spectacle.

His entry into California's 2003 recall election isn't a development that Hayes and Bing could have foreseen, but it certainly doesn't hurt their story. As promoting T3 merges with Schwarzenegger's first steps on the campaign trail, the real revelation is that the mirror works both ways. While it's not news that running for office resembles marketing a movie, you may marvel at how much the high-stakes game of promoting rival blockbusters also parodies an election, with the voters' verdict arriving in the form of the opening-weekend numbers, which studios now consider the whole ball game.

That's why for Arnold—the star as pure essence of Bugs—the transition from the top of one heap to the top of another was no transition at all. While Ronald Reagan was rightly derided for imbibing his values (and whole sense of reality) from Warner Bros.' vaults, at least they were, well, values. A pupil of the industry rather than the art form, Schwarzenegger has only one core value: winning—with all the contempt for losers that implies. One wonders what financially strapped voters watching last summer's Republican convention made of this multimillionaire and Kennedy in-law's cheery command not to be "economic girly-men"; but the truth is probably that they figured he knew what he was talking about.

Along with Arnold's preternatural confidence, the one constant of his unlikely rise has been his genius for PR. He was always among the few stars who relished promoting their movies more than they did appearing in them, and to a man who "at press junkets … might do two hundred interviews in a weekend," as Hayes and Bing put it, "the idea of staying on message politically was as intuitive as a bench press." Although the authors, in one of their rare detectable outbreaks of fawning, soft-pedal his seamy side, characterizing the Premiere article that first publicized his loutish treatment of women as "a nasty takedown attempt" and leaving it at that, Open Wide's glimpses of Schwarzenegger's relentless shrewdness are invaluable. Here he is in newly conquered Baghdad, unveiling Terminator 3 to our presumably grateful soldiery: "It is really wild driving around here. I mean the poverty, and you see there is no money, it is disastrous financially and there is the leadership vacuum, pretty much like in California right now." (Emphasis added; syntax unchanged. But Schwarzenegger's grammar is the sort of off-road vehicle that gets him exactly where he wants to go.)

More trite, but as depressing, is his earlier salute to the troops: "I play Terminator, but you guys are the real Terminators." Because Hayes and Bing aren't culture critics (both are Variety staffers), they don't discuss the gruesome shift in attitudes the Terminator series charts. The 1984 original was a great female-empowerment fable before the genre was familiar, all about average-gal Linda Hamilton's courage in battling her robotic nemesis. By T3, Hamilton had vanished and, in a perfect inversion of the first movie's values, the menacing cyborg Schwarzenegger initially played had been transformed into America's ideal protector. Adding insult to irony, Arnold was facing off against vixenish Kristanna Loken as Hillary Clinton—er, sorry, as the T-X, a female Terminator. It's also nice to learn from Open Wide that Schwarzenegger, no fool about how to thrill teenage boys, personally bankrolled the scene in which he smashes Loken's head into a toilet.

Nonetheless, it's typical of Schwarzenegger's acumen (and cynicism) that he blatantly treated T3 as one last big score—the perfect enhancement of his brand recognition—before launching the political career he'd planned for years. The industry of which he's now an alumnus has no game plan of its own, and Hayes and Bing let the fundamental hysteria of Hollywood's blockbuster mentality speak for itself. Their larger point is that the conventional wisdom holds only until the unconventional kind inevitably demolishes it. The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11—two films destined to be forever linked—demonstrate the blinkered nature of the studios' obsession with comic-book franchises, "sure things" so costly and elaborate that they end up as reckless gambles despite themselves. Bizzers like to pretend that they've rationalized the process, but they haven't. They're just clutching at rabbits' feet.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.